Workstations

The Workstations page is where you define every station that work flows through in your shop — a saw, a CNC mill, an assembly bench, the paint booth, a QC inspection table, the packing area. These workstations are the building blocks of every job’s workflow and every column on the Production kanban. Get this list right and the rest of the system falls into place.

Open it from the main sidebar (Workstations) or by navigating to /workstations.

Workstations page

Workstations vs Departments. A workstation is a single, named station; a Department is a group of related workstations (e.g., Assembly Bench 1, Assembly Bench 2, and Assembly Bench 3 might all belong to the Assembly department). Many features — kanban filters, shared quantity pooling, the Departments Kanban view — operate at the department level. See How Workstations relate to Departments.

What this page is for
Anatomy of the page
Reading the table
Searching
Reordering workstations
Adding a workstation
Editing a workstation — the Workstation panel
Per-workstation toggles — what each one does
Estimated Time
How Workstations relate to Departments
Where Workstations show up elsewhere
Deleting a workstation
Tips and best practices

What this page is for

The Workstations page is your master list of every station in your shop. Use it to:

Set up your shop floor once — every cutting station, machine, bench, booth, and inspection table.
Group stations into departments so kanban filtering and reporting can roll up to the team level.
Control what each station can do — record qty, accept notes, attach photos, run a time-tracking timer, accept drag-in.
Set per-station estimates so each job’s tracked-vs-estimated comparison is meaningful.
Reorder stations so the Production kanban columns line up with how work physically flows through your shop.

Most shops set this up once at onboarding and rarely touch it afterwards — adding a station when a new machine arrives or retiring one when something is mothballed.

Anatomy of the page

From left to right across the top:

Search box — free-text search across workstation name and description.
Show N entries selector — 5 / 10 / 25 / 50 / 100 per page.
Add Workstation button (top-right).

Below the toolbar sits the workstations table, one row per workstation. Each row is clickable — well, the pencil icon on the right opens the edit panel. The standard pagination with a Showing X–Y of Z counter sits underneath.

The leftmost column is a drag handle (the six-dot grip icon) — see Reordering workstations.

Reading the table

Column	What it shows
(drag handle)	Grip handle for reordering.
ID	The internal numeric ID (small, muted).
Name	The workstation’s name, bold.
Department	The parent department’s name (or `-` if the workstation isn’t in any department).
Description	The free-text description, truncated if long.
Qty	Whether quantities can be recorded here (green check ✓ or grey ✕).
Notes	Whether notes can be attached.
Images	Whether photos can be attached.
Time	Whether the Kiosk/mobile timer is available.
Created	When the row was created.
(pencil)	Opens the edit panel.

The table is sorted by display order, then by name — the same order columns appear in on the Production kanban.

Searching

Type into the search box at the top-left. The query matches against:

Name
Description

Search is case-insensitive and uses contains matching. The list refreshes about 300 ms after you stop typing. The query is reflected in the URL so a filtered view is bookmarkable.

Reordering workstations

The order of workstations on this page is the order they appear as columns on the Production kanban and as workstation pickers everywhere else in the system. To change it:

Click and hold the grip handle (six-dot icon) on the left of any row.
Drag the row up or down.
Release.

The new order is saved instantly — no Save button needed. Everyone else’s Production board reflects the new column order within seconds.

Tip. Order workstations from first step of the workflow to last step — left-to-right in the kanban reads like a process diagram for the shop floor.

Each workstation also has a numeric Display Order field in the edit panel for cases where drag-and-drop is awkward (very long lists). Both control the same underlying order value.

Adding a workstation

Click Add Workstation in the top-right. The Workstation panel slides in from the right with an empty form.

At minimum you need a Name. Everything else is optional but worth setting:

Description — what is this station? what kind of work happens here? Visible on the Kiosk so the floor team knows what they’re looking at.
Estimated Time — see Estimated Time.
Display Order — a numeric tie-breaker for sort order. Defaults to 0; you usually set this by drag-and-drop on the list instead.
Department — pick one. You can also leave it blank (“No department”) and assign later.
Permissions toggles — see Per-workstation toggles.

Click Create to save. The workstation appears in the list immediately.

Editing a workstation — the Workstation panel

Click the pencil icon on any row to open the panel in edit mode. The same form appears as in create mode, pre-filled.

The header has two buttons:

Save — applies your changes.
Delete (red) — removes the workstation. Asks for confirmation. See Deleting a workstation.

The form is split into a few sections:

General — Name, Description.
Estimated Time and Display Order side-by-side.
Department — picker.
Permissions — six toggles (Allow Quantity / Notes / Images / Time Tracking / drag-in / Share Planned Qty within department) plus Exclude from order tracking summary.

Per-workstation toggles — what each one does

Every workstation has seven toggles. They control what the Kiosk and the Production board can do at this workstation.

Allow Quantity Input

When on, employees can enter a manufactured quantity at this workstation (via the Kiosk Workstation Editor, the Job panel’s Logs tab, or the API). When off, the workstation is presence-only — touching it from the Kiosk produces a “Mark Complete” button instead of a quantity field, and any qty submitted is forced to the planned qty.

Use off for steps where the count doesn’t matter — inspection passes, QC sign-offs, “send to client” gates.

Allow Notes

When on, an optional Notes textarea appears in the Kiosk editor and the manual Job-log form. Notes show up in the job’s Logs tab attributed to the employee who wrote them.

Useful for QC-heavy steps, deviation capture, or “FYI for next shift” messages.

Allow Images

When on, employees can attach photos to a log entry from the Kiosk (camera or upload). Attachments appear inline on the job’s Logs tab.

Allow Time Tracking

When on, the Kiosk’s Start Work / Stop Work buttons appear for this workstation, time entries are created here, and the workstation appears in the Time Tracking page’s workstation filter. When off, no timer.

Set it on for workstations where labor cost / capacity matters; off for fast clerical steps where timing adds noise without value.

Allow drag-in

A Production-page-only toggle.

When on (the default), supervisors and admins can drag a job’s card from another column into this workstation on the Production kanban. When off, this workstation is a read-only target — cards already there can be dragged out, but nothing can be dragged in.

Use off for workstations whose work list is generated automatically (e.g., a station fed by an upstream CAM tool, or one that should only receive cards via the workflow’s “Activate next task” rules). It prevents an over-eager supervisor from accidentally short-circuiting the workflow.

A subtle but powerful one for shops with interchangeable parallel stations.

When on, the planned quantity on a job is pooled across all workstations in the same department that also have this toggle on. The job’s “completed” indicator goes green once the combined qty from those stations meets the planned figure — it doesn’t matter which one did what share.

Example: Assembly department has Bench 1, Bench 2, Bench 3, each with Share Planned Qty within department = on. A job needs 30 pieces assembled. If Bench 1 does 10, Bench 2 does 12, and Bench 3 does 8 → the job’s assembly step is complete (30/30). Without the toggle, each bench would need its own count to hit 30.

When off (the default), each workstation has its own independent planned/done count.

Exclude from order tracking summary

When on, the workstation is hidden from the public Client Portal progress display. The customer sees a workflow that skips this step entirely; internally everything still works.

Useful for internal-only steps the customer shouldn’t see — QA holds, finance approval, “send to packing” gates, anything that wouldn’t make sense outside the shop.

Estimated Time

The Estimated Time field (hours + minutes) is the per-piece labor budget for this workstation. It’s used in two places:

The Time Tracking tab on each Job’s panel shows Estimated vs Tracked at the top — sum of (workstation estimate × planned qty) on the job, compared to the actual tracked hours from real timer entries. When tracked exceeds estimated, the figure turns red.
The same comparison drives the Total Time column on the Jobs page, which highlights over-budget jobs.

Leave it blank if you don’t have a meaningful estimate yet — the per-job time tab will still show actual tracked time, it just won’t have anything to compare against.

What about pieces with very different estimates on the same workstation? This field is the per-workstation default. If a specific job needs to override it, the planner can edit the per-job-workstation estimate from the Job panel → Workstations tab. The default here is just the starting point.

How Workstations relate to Departments

A workstation can belong to at most one department. Departments are managed at App Settings → Departments (or /departments).

Several features only make sense once departments are set up:

The Production page’s Departments Kanban view lets the team isolate one department at a time.
The same view colors every workstation column with its department’s color, so a wide kanban becomes scannable at a glance.
The Time Tracking page’s Workstation filter lists every workstation; if you also want a department-level roll-up, group conceptually similar workstations into the same department and use the workstation filter for individual stations.
The Share Planned Qty within department toggle (above) only works when stations share a department.

A workstation without a department still functions perfectly — it just won’t show up grouped/colored and can’t participate in shared-qty pooling.

Where Workstations show up elsewhere

Changes here propagate to every screen that touches workstations:

Where	What you’ll see
Production page	One kanban column per workstation, in the order you set here. Drag-in respects the Allow drag-in toggle.
Jobs page	One column per workstation in the data-table view. Workstation pickers in the Job panel’s Workstations tab list everything from here.
Job panel → Workstations tab	The list of stations on this job. Each row inherits its Allow Qty / Notes / Images / Time Tracking defaults from here but can be overridden per-job-per-station.
Kiosk	Workers see the workstations they’re authorized for, with toggles applied.
Time Tracking page	A Workstation filter lists everything from here that has at least one time entry.
Job Templates	Templates are built from workstations — what’s on this page is what templates can reference.
Cron Jobs (docs)	Each cron job is scoped to specific workstations. The list is sourced from this page.
Webhooks (docs)	Webhook workstation-scoping uses this list.

Changes here take effect everywhere immediately — no cache to clear.

Deleting a workstation

Open the workstation in the panel → click the red Delete button → confirm. The workstation is removed permanently.

Be careful. Workstations are referenced by Jobs (via job-workstation rows), time-tracking entries, job logs, kanban views, cron jobs, and webhooks. Deletion will cascade or break those references depending on how the database is set up — the safer alternative is usually to:

Disable the workstation by turning off every permission toggle (no qty, no notes, no time tracking, no drag-in) — it stays on the kanban but does nothing.

Hide it from the kanban by removing it from any custom Kanban View’s column list (in App Settings → Kanban Views).

Only delete a workstation that you’re certain has no live or recent data attached.

There is no “trash” / undo for a deleted workstation. If you need it back, you’ll recreate it (which gives it a new ID — historical entries that referenced the old ID will keep their reference dangling).

Tips and best practices

Set up your stations before your first job. Adding a job that uses a workstation that doesn’t exist is awkward; trying to delete a workstation that’s already been used is awkward in the other direction.
Order workstations in the order work flows. The Production kanban reads left-to-right like a process diagram; matching the physical flow makes it much easier for the team to scan.
Group related stations into departments. It costs nothing and unlocks the Departments Kanban, color-coding, and shared-qty pooling.
Be deliberate with Allow Time Tracking. Turning it on for every station produces lots of clean data; turning it on selectively keeps the dataset focused on labor that actually drives cost.
Use Share Planned Qty within department when you have parallel benches. The alternative — manually load-balancing planned quantities per station — is brittle and wastes the planner’s time.
Use Allow drag-in = off on auto-fed stations. It saves a supervisor from accidentally moving work around your workflow’s automatic activation rules.
Use Exclude from order tracking summary for internal-only steps. Your customers don’t need to see “Finance approval pending” on their tracking page; the shop floor still does.
Set Estimated Time, even roughly. Without it the per-job tracked-vs-estimated comparison can only show tracked. A rough estimate (within a factor of 2) is still vastly more useful than none.
Don’t delete; disable. As above — turning toggles off neutralizes a station without breaking historical data.
Combine with Kanban Views to give different shop-floor displays only the workstations they care about — the master list lives here, the per-display selection lives there.